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Six Nobel peace laureates meet in Belfast in 2013. Credit: John Murphy Aurora PA.“We want all the
barriers down,” declared Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Maguire yesterday,
opening the 10th anniversary of the Nobel Women’s Initiative
gathering in Dusseldorf, Germany. She was, incidentally, joking, referring to
the fact that – due to variations in height and levels of jet leg – some of the five Nobel peace prize winners at
the summit would be standing to
deliver their opening address, while others would be sitting. But as the laureates spoke, the room moved from laugher to
respectful silence as each laid out her vision for what a world without
barriers to feminist solidarity might look like.

The
laureates have gathered from across the globe – Guatemala, Ireland, USA, Iran
and Yemen – and they have assembled an international team of activists here to
plan the future of the global feminist resistance.

Tawakkol Karman,
who won the peace prize in 2011 for her work fighting for democracy in Yemen,
explains why they have chosen Germany as the site for this year’s meeting: “Germany
is ruled by a strong woman. She has a lot of commitment and promise for
refugees. We wanted to go to Germany to give support for her policies on
supporting and hosting refugees.” Yet disappointingly, as Tawakkol goes on to
explain, in a Europe of closing borders, the culture of welcome the Nobel
laureates sought to celebrate has not been extended to its own delegation.

All four other
participants to the conference from Yemen have been denied visas, as were three
other participants from Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. ”Why?” Tawakkol asked.
“There is no good reason.”

All of those
denied visas are high profile human rights activists in their home countries.
Among them are Aswan Mohammed from Women Journalists Without Chains and Misk
Al-Junai, a TV producer who works with Karman’s own foundation. “Perhaps”, Karman
opined, “Europe is imposing its own unwritten travel ban? Perhaps Trump just
announced it, and other countries didn’t?”

Iranian Nobel
peace prize laureate and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi was similarly
indignant: “there are countries that are in crisis and at war, and the people
are suffering in these countries, their lives are at risk and they are hungry.
Some Western countries, instead of helping these people are making limitations
for them. It’s time for Europe, and for us who are gathered here, to help these
people in war-torn areas; not to build walls and to not even permit them to
participate in a simple peace seminar. This is not good behaviour with
countries that are at war. And we protest this.”

The true
cost of erecting such barriers at borders – and the fundamental need to protest
them – is also stressed by American Nobel peace prize laureate Jody Williams.
She speaks of the work of Northern Americans assisting Muslim families to
reunite following the fallout from Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ earlier this year. “In
such resistance,” she stresses, “we’re rediscovering what citizenship is.”

For the fifty plus activist women in the room
here in Germany, it’s clear that citizenship is a duty – and it’s one that
transcends barriers and borders.

Citizenship without borders

It is her
citizen duty, Shirin explains to me, that leads her to approach Majed Sharbajy,
a Syrian activist in exile who is currently working in Lebanon near the Syrian
border. Breaching the rules of the ‘ice breaker exercise’ carefully crafted by
the conference organisers, Shirin makes Majed’s acquaintance by looking her
directly in the eyes with a piercing sincerity, and saying the words “I’m
sorry.”

Majed has
just recounted to a small group of us how she was detained by the Assad regime
for seven months. Her husband was also detained, and murdered. She has been
temporarily separated from her children – aged 4, 11 and 3 – who have sought sanctuary in Sweden with
their grandmother. Her work is simply too dangerous and puts them at risk. But
her work is also too important to leave.

In prison, Majed educated other women detainees. Now in exile in
Lebanon, the activists have four training centres for Syrian women to give them
skills to enter the labour market and participate in society. In her
experience, 60% of women Syrian refugees have lost their male partners and must
support themselves.

“The Syrian
regime is the biggest dictatorship of all the regimes,” Majed explains to a small group of us who are leaning in intently, to
listen. “They don’t just torture people,
really, they take pleasure in it.”

It’s at
this point that Shirin apologises.

“As an Iranian,
I’m sorry,” she says. “My government has trained Syrians how to torture
people.”

A
respectful silence momentarily reigns while each of us takes in these words and
crafts our own apologies, weighing the responsibility. Letting it sink in. Then
the discussion continues. Time is short and information must be gathered and
shared.

Syria is
strategically important to Iran: “they need it to get arms to Hezbollah” explains
Ebadi – arms, it has
been pointed out several times already, that travel more easily across borders
than people.

Women
from Guatemala, Germany, UK and Lebanon hastily scribble on notepads, desperate
to listen, and to record every word so that they might take it back to their
communities, like smuggled goods. Because the international community has been
clear – we are not meant to be here, meeting like this.

Majed has given us a huge duty, to ‘be our voice’. For, she
explains, “the media is mediating everything. Everyone is focusing on ISIS,
eyes are off the regime.” Children are drowning, they are choking to death on
the fumes of illegal weapons. No one is stopping this. Treaties must be
redrafted and implemented.

“We cannot fall
into negative history where history repeats itself,” Tawakkol reminded us in
her opening speech. “Behind every great revolution there are bold women,
courageous women. We need to be leaders of change. We need development, rule of
law, democracy. We need to fight extremism, corruption, hatred, racism and
war."

Taking down barriers means taking back power from the states that claim
to represent us. “Turkey, Iran and Russia are meeting for peace negotiations on
Syria and there isn’t a single person from Syria,” Majed warns us, “the media keep saying that it’s a civil war, but it’s a war between
other countries in Syria.” Shirin gives a knowing nod: “a proxy war.”

The beginning of justice?

The act of
apologising in itself will not start a revolution but it is, to me, the core of
the feminist resistance that this conference seeks to strengthen. It is the
beginning of justice. It says: I am a human, and I see you as a human. I see
your injustice and your pain and I accept responsibility as a global citizen
and I will use my power to try and help you. It is the antithesis to impunity.
It is opposite to the Guatemalan courts that, until women seized justice and
won, as Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchù Tum explained in her
speech, “never gave victims the chance to tell the true story.”

It’s up
to us to reclaim citizenship, with barriers down, Shirin reminds us. Because “governments don’t like peace. The arms
manufacturers of the UK, Europe and the US have to sell their arms. It’s us,
the people, who have to resist our governments. This is my duty as an Iranian,
to tell the government of Iran not to help Bashir Al Assad and to stay away
from Syria. It’s your duty as European citizens to tell the EU, to protest at
the fact they refrain from issuing visas. It’s the duty of people of the UK to
tell them to stop selling arms so that they can throw them on innocent people.”

I look around at
the women I am with. It’s the first night and the sixth edition of the Nobel
Women’s Initiative biennial gatherings and 50.50 has been here from the start. Many
of the women have become close friends, ‘sisters’ across borders. As they steal off to bed, tired from their
travels (and for some, long interrogations at the border) I notice that some
are wearing jewelry, brought in luggage across continents as gifts to one
another. Like arms and capital, gifts and words fly across the same continents
as the women meet, plot and share information in the global feminist
resistance.

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